1844 7th Ave., Oakland

Rain drops form from water vapor in clouds. That’s creation.
They fall from the clouds when they become liquid. That’s birth.
The whole journey down, spiraling and falling, plummeting and screaming, that’s living.
That’s the exciting part. When the drop is an individual and experiences everything individually and is completely distinguishable from all the other drops falling in the storm. The storm is life itself.
It hurts to hit the ground from that height. That’s death, jarring, painful and conclusive.

SPLATT!! Wherever the raindrop meets the earth, it joins with other drops, it becomes one with the collective whole again. As water, it flows down gutters or into the earth or into streams and rivers. The drop doesn’t exist anymore as it did while it was falling. The substance is there, but the form is gone. As a body of water, everything flows easily and there are no problems, no distinguishing between this drop and that drop.

Time comes eventually and inevitably that the water evaporates. It loses all form and its substance becomes too thin to discern. In this amorphous state, all memory is erased. All memory of the collective mind is lost. All memory of the previous journey is lost. All memory of the previous storm is lost.

It’s still part of the collective mind, but without form and without substance. It’s a transformation period, unknown and indescribable. It’s an important part of the journey, the cycle to go back up into the sky, be created, born, live, and die again.

The storm is life. That much is known. Living is tears, that much is also known.

1844 7th Ave., Oakland

My anger grows with my disbelief that I’m in law school. The situation has been bleak. My hatred towards the ‘rents is hampered only by religious teachings which demand forgiveness. But as long as I’m a member of the earthly world, I hate them with every ounce of hate I can conjure.

It’s been a while since they’ve called. That’s a sure indication that something is going on in their minds. It could be cowardice or lack of concern. It’s something. Whatever it is, it makes me angry because I’m in this situation here because of and for them. If they make no gesture that there is something important about it, I have no motivation to stay. Hey, I made it out to California, what I decide now is all my decision and I have a right to it.

Not only do I not think in the way required to be an attorney, but I also hate the approach legal “thinking” is required to take: you start with your conclusion and then you do the research to come up with the argument to support that conclusion. It’s not truth, it’s not justice, it’s whoever can conjure the better argument by whatever means available.

I also find it offensive that to be an effective attorney, you have to thoroughly research and be able to argue the other side as if it were truth, and then reject it, dismiss it, rebut it for a client, for someone who is paying you to win. It makes absolutely no sense to me, it’s not logical, it destroys the credibility of the legal system. Truth is arbitrary in the legal system. It’s far from absolute.

I’ve started to feel that I’m not biding my time by going to law school, looking for other opportunities, I’m wasting my time. I look at the people in law school and these are people who have committed to a career in law. It’s what they want to do with their lives and they are putting their full effort into it. Not just floating through like I am. This has nothing to do with what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I may not make it to exams, I haven’t a clue about what’s going on or what I’m supposed to be learning. I can’t make the connections that everyone else seems to be able to make. So maybe I’ll drop out right before exams and start looking for a job immediately. When Amina comes, I’ll start bartending school and hope they place me in a job come January.

1844 7th Ave., Oakland

I hate living in the city. Dust, dirt, and grime everywhere. I hate feeling lonely. I hate the material world. I hate the world around me.

The ‘rents haven’t called much; you’d think that they’d be more interested in their investment. I wonder if the guilt is catching up to them. Yea, right. They have no idea, not a clue. When they did call, they asked about school and I gave them a frigid reaction. I didn’t tell them outright that I hated it, but I was evasive and tried to convey that I was not going to speak my true feelings on the matter. They didn’t press. They avoided the topic thereafter.

They know that my going to law school is for them. They don’t care about what I want to do or how I feel about what I’m doing. They don’t know anything about me. It would blow their minds if they had an inkling of what I was really about. I can’t even guess what their reaction might be to finding anything about me.

Avoiding the problem is the pattern for them. They don’t want to know so they hide their heads in the sand. They can’t face up to the truth. They can’t even find a simple way to be honest and make it sound good, “Life is hard, anything you do is hard, stay in law school or we stop sending you money”. Even that is better than glossing everything over and insisting that law school is really what I want to do, as if they know me and what I want to do.

1844 7th Ave., Oakland

I can’t believe I survived until September! What? Two weeks? Law school sucks, it’s hard as hell and requires a mindset that I’d rather not develop. I’m utterly and completely unmotivated and depressed. It’s antithetical to the person I want to be.

I have some good days, some bad. Some days are hard, other days harder. I’m mostly lonely and I feel displaced. My class schedule is hardest on Mondays and Wednesdays. By the end of the day, I walk out of classes in a daze and I have to decompress and recover. It makes me really hate the ‘rents. How much more can I possibly hate them?

I have some days that are really bad but I don’t realize how bad they are until halfway through and look back at it. Today was one of those days. It’s hard not to have bad days when all days depress me to some extent. What topped it off today was hitting an old lady’s car with my Rodeo. My car was undamaged, but I broke one of her rear lights.

It all came rushing at me: I hate living in this world. I hate material life. There are too many people, too many bad people. Too much liability, too many people at too many other peoples’ throats. Life and society is too complicated.

This isn’t the result of hitting that old lady’s car, don’t get me wrong. She came out of her car yelling up a storm, but she was immediately placated when I apologized and told her I would be more than happy to pay for the damage. She became very civil at that point and there was no conflict to resolve. But it’s sad that her first reaction was to be antagonistic and belligerent.

But my problem is that it could have been worse. I’ve never had to deal with responsibility and real life and living. I’ve never lived in the “real” world, I’ve always had things done for me. I could afford to be stuck in a mental hospital when other people have such worse problems than I do.

Until recently I’ve never had to deal with taxes, voting, insurance, credit, bank accounts, jobs. But this accident stirred things up - damages caused to other people, responsibility and liability, having to watch your every move so that you don’t accidentally step on someone’s toes and get sued for battery. Is that what real life is about? Is that how people want to live their lives?

I didn’t have to hit that old lady. I didn’t have to be there to hit that old lady. I didn’t have to have been in my car today. I could have stopped at some other supermarket, I didn’t have to try to get around her because she was driving like . . . an old lady. It was so arbitrary.